Then it was a matter of dodging questions from curious Dead Enders, avoiding the carnival folks trying to get us to try our luck at ring toss and plastic-duck shooting, and skirting around the long line of people waiting to ride the Tilt-A-Wheel.
The rides looked a lot more rickety and precarious to me now than they had when I was Shelley's age. Maybe they were the same rides, twenty years older? Or was I just seeing everything with the boringly pragmatic viewpoint of an adult? The age when kids released their sticky-fingered grasp on the sparkle and shimmer of magic was getting younger and younger, sadly—Shelley was already more grown up at her age than I'd been at three or four years older.
Still, I kind of wanted to go for a ride now. Spinning and laughing and being silly sounded a whole lot more fun than what I'd been up to all week—and what possibly faced us now.
"Uncle Mike let me ride that five times," Shelley announced, a proud grin on her tiny face.
I had to smile. Uncle Mike had let me ride all the rides way more than was good for me too, much to Aunt Ruby's dismay.
"How many times did you throw up?"
She winced. "Only once. Well, one and a half times."
"How do you throw up a half time?"
"I'd only eaten half my funnel cake before I got on the Tilt-A-Wheel that last time! Oh, I almost forgot!" She stopped walking and fumbled in the pocket of her pink cotton shorts and then pulled out a wad of crumpled white paper.
"I saved the other half for you!"
"Thanks," I said dryly, taking the smashed funnel cake and tossing it in the trash bin on my left. "I'm good."
"Hey! I could have eaten that!"
I just laughed and started walking again. "I think throwing up one and half times is enough for one night. This is only the first day of the festival. You can come again tomorrow and Sunday."
"Yeah, but Uncle Mike said they never have the rides still up on Sunday." She kicked a rock out of her way, sulking, but I knew it wouldn't last long. Despite everything she'd been through, her naturally sunny personality was shining through again these days, and we were all delighted.
"There's my car." I'd parked it far behind the crush of festival goers when Jack and I had returned from rescuing our friend Mellie. Her cousin Vern had been keeping her captive for a week while he carried out a bizarre stalkerish plan against me, which had begun with Vern anonymously giving me a ring—still on the finger of the previous owner.
Yeah, he gave me the finger.
Literally.
I shuddered at the memory and unlocked the car. Locking cars was a new thing for me since our little town had always been so safe and I'd never had a car new enough to worry about it getting stolen before, but after all the dead bodies I'd encountered in the past year, I was becoming much more safety conscious.
Shelley slid in the back seat of my early birthday gift—a sweet Mustang my grandmother the banshee had given me—and fastened her seatbelt. I waited outside the car until I saw Jack striding toward me, looking serious.
"Is Eleanor okay?"
"She's fine. She was coming to when I put her in the car, but she pretended she wasn't. Probably to avoid talking to me. She isn't coming to Ruby and Mike's. Bill said she needs to go home and rest. I think she just doesn't want to talk about it."
"This is getting weirder and weirder."
He nodded, and we got in the car. I put the key in the ignition, worrying about what could possibly make Aunt Ruby and Eleanor react like that. Not to mention what in the world was up with Lorraine and her dead husband—and whether that skeleton really was Earl at all.
"Is Aunt Eleanor going to be okay?" Shelley's voice sounded shaky.
Jack turned to send her a reassuring smile. "She's going to be just fine. She was already awake when we got to Mr. Oliver's car."
Shelley didn't answer him. When I glanced in the rear-view mirror, I saw tears trembling on her lashes. She'd been through far too much in her short life to take it calmly when someone she knew and loved fainted right in front of her, not to mention Lorraine's arrest. I tapped Jack's arm with my finger and tilted my head toward Shelley. He nodded. Hopefully that meant using my nonexistent Jedi-mind-trick powers to ask him to distract her had actually worked.
"Shelley. I know I'm just a guy, so maybe I can't understand how this works, but why is EleanorAuntEleanor but Tess isn't Aunt Tess?"
She giggled. Just a tiny breath of a sound, but it was there, and it made me glad.
"Tess is my new sister, not my aunt, Jack. Duh!"
Jack grinned, and I had a feeling eye rolling had been involved with that "duh."
